Friday, April 15, 2016

I lived my George Plimpton moment at the ATP 250 U.S.Clay Court Championships in Houston last weekend. A great time interviewing John Isner (at left), Sam Querrey, and trying to return a ball from Reilly Opelka, who we will definitely be hearing more about. Read all about it on the Sports Illustrated web site.

Saturday, March 26, 2016

I'll be signing copies of Red Dirt: A Tennis
Novel at the U.S. Men's Clay Court Championship at
the River Oaks Country Club in Houston, Texas, from noon-2 p.m. Friday, April
8, in the USTA tent. This is an appropriate setting being that the
tournament is the only ATP event in the U.S. played on red dirt, preceding the
European clay court season that leads up to the French Open. I'm looking forward
to returning to Houston, where I lived and played a lot of tennis from 1997 to
1999.

Recent support of the book has come from two big names at Sports Illustrated
who know a thing or two about tennis. Frank Deford said, "I enjoyed it
immensely...a marvelous job of pivoting the plot and making it such a good
story." Jon L. Wertheim, executive editor for SI and a regular
fixture on Tennis Channel, said in his pre-U.S. Open blog post last August
that it "comes with highest recommendation."

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Fifteen years ago, after I had begun to get serious about writing fiction, Larry Brown's stories, novels, and especially his essays that shared his own experience inspired me to keep working -- even when my own writing was not going very well. When my first novel Calling came out in 2005, the year after he died at the young age of 53, I dedicated it in his memory. Now, my essay "Larry Brown: A Firefighter Finds His Voice" is part of the new collection Rough South, Rural South: Region and Class in Recent Southern Literature. I hope that it helps more readers and writers to discover him. The collection was published this month by the University Press of Mississippi and edited by Jean W. Cash and Keith Perry.

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Frank Wilson, the retired books editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer, reviews Red Dirt very kindly in this Sunday's paper. "I am sure I didn't understand all the
technical nuances, but I always got the gist," Wilson writes. "That's because Starnes
shrewdly couches them in a way that makes the playing on the court seem
so much a metaphor for life's vicissitudes and our own fleeting
awareness." Check out the full review online. For previous reviews and coverage, click here.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Since Red Dirt: A Tennis Novel's release, the novel has been reviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer, among other places, and I've been interviewed a few times, including one television appearance. I also have turned up in a few other news stories in the Inquirer, and I contributed an essay about the best tennis matches I ever saw. Here's a roundup with links:

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Red Dirt: A Tennis Novel -- described as both a "tale with the pace and power of a Rafael Nadal forehand" and "the original redneck Rocky of tennis novels" -- is now available. From April 18 through April 25 I have eleven events lined up in Georgia and Alabama. Check out my schedule and come see me if you can. I'm looking forward to taking the book back home where my tennis game and my literary life originated.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

The first reading of Red Dirt: A Tennis Novel was a fantastic time. I'm glad I could share it with golf writer and friend Tom Coyne who read an early draft of Red Dirt seven years ago. Upcoming events include Exton, Pennsylvania; Montclair, New Jersey; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and then a late April southern swing with Georgia stops in Atlanta, Athens, Cedartown, Norcross, Rome, and Woodstock. I'll also be making Alabama stops in Hoover and Homewood on April 25. Check out my full schedule of events with dates and times.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

My third novel, Red Dirt: A Tennis Novel, published by Breakaway Books, will be available in late March.

Praise for the Novel

“Starnes spins a tale with the pace and power of a Rafael
Nadal forehand.”

—Jay Jennings, editor of Tennis and
the Meaning of Life: A Literary Anthology of the Game

“Alright, literate tennis fans, it’s time to put down the
remote and set aside those stat sheets and take an alternately amusing and
inspiring trip from the top of the pro tennis barrel to the bottom—and back
again. Joe Samuel Starnes’s book radiates an aficionado’s understanding of not
just how the game is played (on and off the court) but what it takes to triumph
in the hypercompetitive pro game.” —Peter Bodo, Tennis
magazine senior writer, ESPN columnist,
and co-author of Pete Sampras’s autobiography, A
Champion’s Mind

“Red Dirt is solid pleasure. Starnes knows what it is to compete, to
hope to be made whole by competition, to overcome not just your opponent but
your own unquiet. This is a tennis novel, but any athlete—no, any reader—will
learn a lot and enjoy the learning.” —John Casey, author of
Spartina, winner of the National Book Award

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Originally published in hardback in 2005, my first novel Calling is now available as an ebook thanks to Otto Penzler and the folks at MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media. I recently talked about the novel and other things with Gef Fox on his blog in this new interview. New comments about the novel include this one by Jean W. Cash, biographer of both Flannery O'Connor and Larry Brown:

"Calling is a powerful novel, one that features two men from the
South—both much damaged by heredity and experience. Ezekiel Blizzard Jr.
and Timber Goodman seem to be cut from different fabrics, but they ultimately
understand how much they share. They meet on a long bus trip between Las
Vegas and Salt Lake City. Starnes’s adept use of the journey motif and a
colloquy between the two provide apt vehicles for this novel of personal
disclosure, tragedy and tentative redemption for at least one of the men. The influence of Larry Brown, to whom Starnes dedicated the novel, is apparent
in Starnes’s concern with the perennial struggle between good and evil. Zeke Blizzard also shares much with several of Flannery O’Connor’s ruined
preachers, most notably Asa Hawks in Wise Blood."